Storm Born

By Christine Pope

Love can strike like lightning — but so can trouble.
Lightning doesn’t just strike twice for Adara Grant. It strikes all the time. She suffers a setback; the heavens open up. She gets bullied; a tornado flattens a barn. Addie’s mother has always found an excuse to move before whispers and stares morph into pitchforks, but Addie suspects there’s a connection.

She just doesn’t know how. Or why.

Jake Wilcox is a witch hunter — for a good cause. His pet project is a powerful data-mining program that detects lone witches when their gifts manifest, thus bringing these “orphaned” witches under the Wilcox clan’s protection.

When Jake follows a lead to tiny, remote Kanab, Utah, he discovers a young witch as wild and beautiful as a desert storm. But he’s not the only witch hunter in town, and in an instant, Jake and Addie are on the run from someone hungry to use her gift for evil.

Addie finds a new home and protection with the Wilcox clan, but as danger closes in like an icy storm front, she faces a heartbreaking choice to protect her newfound family — and the man she’s coming to love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Pope
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020

Christine Pope

A native of Southern California, Christine Pope has been writing stories ever since she commandeered her family’s Smith-Corona typewriter back in grade school and is currently working on her hundredth book.Christine writes as the mood takes her, and so her work includes paranormal romance, paranormal cozy mysteries, and fantasy romance. She blames this on being easily distracted by bright, shiny objects, which could also account for the size of her shoe collection. While researching the Djinn Wars series, she fell in love with the Land of Enchantment and now makes her home in New Mexico.

Book preview

Prologue

Jake Wilcox pulled out his phone to check the time again. Five minutes after two. In the grand scheme of things, being five minutes late wasn’t that big a deal, but he wanted this meeting over with so he could roll up his sleeves and get to work. True, Connor Wilcox, the leader — primus — of the Wilcox witch clan in Flagstaff had already signed off on the project, but Jake wanted Connor to see what had been accomplished since the primus had given the go-ahead some six months earlier.

From the outside, the place looked like an ordinary two-story house, built in the Craftsman style of the turn of the last century. The neighborhood around Wheeler Park was filled with those types of homes, some of which had been converted to office space, just as this house had been. However, Jake very much doubted that the graphic design companies and nurse-practitioners and contractors who’d taken up space in similar venues nearby had any idea what was actually hidden inside the white house with the green trim and the modest Trident Enterprises nameplate next to the door.

If asked, he would have told any of those neighbors that Trident Enterprises was an information technology company that specialized in various low-cost computing solutions for small businesses. However, although he’d exchanged greetings with a few of the people who occupied homes in the area, no one had ever asked him for that information. No, they just seemed happy that the formerly rundown property had been painted and spruced up in general, thus improving the overall look of the neighborhood.

On the house’s second story, not all that much had been changed — there were still three bedrooms and a bathroom, although everything had been updated and redone. Jake figured it couldn’t hurt to keep the bedrooms furnished for the time being, since he didn’t know whether there might be occasions where he or one of the other Wilcox witches or warlocks working for Trident Enterprises might not need to crash there. If any outsiders had peeked into those rooms, they would have seen beds and nightstands and dressers, carefully framed prints on the walls. Jake’s cousin Laurel had made the design decisions, clearly all too happy to be set loose on the local furniture stores with Trident’s generous budget funding her purchases.

Downstairs, however…the contents of the downstairs rooms probably would have shocked their neighbors, while the spaces themselves would have been well-nigh unrecognizable to the home’s original owners.

The living room was split into three workstations, each outfitted with a Mac Pro computer and a pair of large cinema displays. The dining room had four more workstations equipped with the best PCs money could buy. A dedicated high-speed line had been run to the property, and a host of anti-surveillance equipment installed — all under the supervision of Jake’s younger brother Jeremy, who was a genius with computers and electronics. Actually, computers were his magical gift, a talent that no one in the Wilcox clan had ever heard of before. No one among the McAllisters or the de la Paz clan had ever encountered it, either, making Jeremy unique even among their already rarefied population.

In a way, it was Jeremy’s talent with computers and code that had first prompted the germ of the idea that became Trident Enterprises.

Hello! came Connor’s voice from the living room. Jake immediately left the dining room, where he’d been hooking up the new color laser printer that had just been delivered a few hours earlier, and went out to meet the primus. The front door had been locked, since there was so much valuable equipment stored in the house, but locked doors weren’t much of a barrier for witch-kind.

Hi, Connor, Jake said. Glad you could make it.

Oh, I didn’t want to miss this, Connor replied, looking around with approval in his greenish-gray eyes. Sorry I’m a little late — I was working at the vineyard this morning.

Connor was a silent partner in Angel Hill Cellars, a vineyard down in Page Springs run by Anthony Rocha, the husband of Connor’s wife Angela’s best friend. As far as he could tell, Jake guessed that Connor let Anthony do most of the heavy lifting, since he was the one with an enology degree, but even so, Angel Hill seemed to occupy a good deal of the primus’s time. Even though it was early June, and Connor and Angela would normally have relocated their family to their home in Flagstaff by that point, they were still down in the large Victorian house in Jerome that Angela had inherited when she became prima of the McAllister clan.

Still, Jake wouldn’t comment on the tardiness of the Wilcox/McAllister household’s return to Flagstaff. The biannual move was Connor and Angela’s business, and not the sort of thing that a peripheral third cousin should be commenting on. Or at least, Jake viewed the situation that way, even though he knew Connor tended to be pretty easygoing about those sorts of things, and was far less bound up in formalities and tradition than his older brother Damon, who’d been the previous primus. Not that Jake had had many dealings with Damon; he’d been in high school when Damon passed away, and there had never been any real reason for the two of them to interact beyond an exchange of greetings at the Wilcox holiday potluck, that sort of thing.

No worries, Jake said in response to his cousin’s apology. I was just getting the last of the equipment set up.

Connor raised an eyebrow. He was tall and dark-haired like most of the Wilcox men, with high cheekbones and a long nose that betrayed the Navajo heritage of his line, even though the Native American witch who’d been his ancestor was now seven generations back or so. I thought Jeremy was handling that stuff.

Oh, he did most of it, Jake said, not at all offended by his cousin’s assumption that he might not be up to a lot of technical tasks. But while I’m not exactly a computer genius like he is, I can handle hooking up a printer. He had to go over to Lowe’s — he needed some fasteners to finish installing the radio equipment in the next room.

The primus absorbed this explanation without comment. He silently surveyed the room, taking in the sleek wood and glass desks that held the Mac Pros, the large whiteboard that covered most of one wall. The modern furniture was a direct contrast to the house that contained it, and yet it somehow seemed to work together harmoniously enough, probably because Jake and his cousin Laurel had done their best to choose office furniture that spoke of this century while still allowing a nod to the hundred-year-old house.

How many people do you have on board right now? Connor asked at last.

Just me and Jeremy and Laurel, Jake said. Since she just wrapped up getting her degree in computer science at NAU, we figured she’d be a good person to help us compile data. And because her talent is healing, she could be a handy person to have around…just in case.

This comment elicited another raised eyebrow. I’m surprised Eleanor was willing to let Laurel go that easily.

While Jake was doing his best to seem professional and on top of everything — even though this was his first try at being a manager and he realized he honestly didn’t know what the hell he was doing — he couldn’t help grinning at Connor’s remark…mostly because it had taken a lot of persuading to convince the clan’s healer that Laurel’s talents couldn’t be put to better use elsewhere. Who said it was easy?

Well, I kind of have to side with Eleanor on this one, Connor said, his expression now completely serious. Healers are always desperately needed.

True, Jake allowed, but Laurel promised Eleanor that if anything happened that required all hands on deck, then of course, she would help out. But really, Eleanor isn’t swamped. We all have our own doctors — she’s even admitted that she advises people to see a specialist for a lot of things.

The primus didn’t argue with that statement, probably because he knew it was the simple truth. In fact, he and his wife had gone to a civilian — nonmagical — doctor for Angela’s pregnancies. Eleanor was a very good healer, but even she couldn’t handle all eventualities.

So, you’re going to ‘flip the switch’ — so to speak — tomorrow? Connor asked next, apparently deciding that he wasn’t going to argue the point as to whether babysitting Trident Enterprises’ data flow was really what Laurel should be doing with her gifts.

That’s the plan, Jake replied. Although he tried to sound casual, he couldn’t help but feel a stir of anticipation — well mixed with anxiety — somewhere deep inside. After all, the idea of this project had consumed him for far longer than the six months that they’d been actively working on making Trident a reality.

No, if he wanted to admit it to himself, the thought had taken on a life of its own almost three years ago now. Three years since he’d lost Sarah, and had desperately started searching for something to consume his empty days, some sort of project that would maybe help him forget — if only for an hour here and there — the gaping hole she’d left in his life.

On the surface, the idea was simple enough. It had floated into his mind one day as he listened to his mother talking to another Wilcox cousin on the phone, discussing how the cousin’s oldest child had just turned eleven, and how her magical talents had begun to manifest. The conversation had been cheerful enough — the little girl’s ability was working with plants, helping them grow — and almost matter-of-fact. After all, that was just how it happened in a witch clan. Around the age of ten or eleven, or possibly a little younger if a child was precocious, like Connor and Angela’s oldest daughter Emily, those magical gifts began to manifest, and others in the clan encouraged them and helped them along, assisting the child with learning all the facets of their gift and how best to use it without hurting themselves or anyone around them.

Only…what would happen if a witch or warlock was born outside a clan? At first, when Jake had broached the idea to his mother, she’d frowned and said that magical talent was hereditary, and so there weren’t any rogue witches or warlocks suddenly appearing amongst the civilian population, since all of witch-kind was bound by the clans that people were born into. Which all seemed pretty neat and tidy, but didn’t really cover any witch or warlock hook-ups with civilians. It would be nice to pretend that such things didn’t happen — and they were probably pretty rare, just because the tendency among witches and warlocks was to find your match fairly early on, and to get married and start a family right away. After all, he’d known with Sarah from the time they were both barely twenty-one that they were meant to be together. They’d decided to wait, though, just because she wanted to get her master’s degree in education and thought it was better to focus on school rather than get married immediately and set up a household.

They shouldn’t have waited. They should have gotten married as soon as they both earned their undergraduate degrees. But Jake had agreed, figuring another two years wouldn’t matter so much in the grand scheme of things. They were already together, and waiting for a little piece of paper wasn’t such a big deal.

Except it was a big deal, because she’d been a year away from getting her master’s when she went on the camping trip that changed everything.

At any rate, Jake speculated that there must be children out in the world who had no idea one of their parents was a witch or warlock. Most likely warlock, just because the sad truth was that women were generally the ones who got left with any unplanned children, and even if a witch had an affair with a civilian and had a child by him, she’d know what to do once that child got old enough to start showing signs of magical ability.

What would it be like, though, to have no idea who your father was, to start to manifest those powers and not know what in the world to do about them? Jake guessed it would have to be frightening as hell, especially with no one to guide you along and explain that it was all perfectly normal…for someone born to witch-kind, anyway.

And that was when he resolved to figure out a way how to track down those lost witches and warlocks, to do his best to discover who their parents actually were so they could be reunited with the clans where they belonged. He’d brought up the idea to Jeremy, figuring if his computer-genius brother couldn’t figure out the logistics of such a project, then it was basically impossible and would be dead in the water before he even got started. But Jeremy had seized on the notion immediately, and said it actually wouldn’t be that hard, that he’d write algorithms to analyze news from all over the world, to scan through Facebook and Twitter feeds, through police and emergency scanners and any other sources of information available, and so track down the bits and pieces that sounded like magical powers showing up out of the blue. One belief all of witch-kind shared was the need to keep their existence a secret, and so no one who’d been raised in a clan would ever do anything to jeopardize that secrecy.

But a witch or warlock who didn’t even know what they were…well, obviously, that kind of person might not be quite so careful.

Once they had a working business plan — and Jeremy had specified the kind of equipment and resources they’d need — Jake had brought the project to Connor. Honestly, he hadn’t been sure whether the primus would really be on board or not. It was going to be an expensive proposition…not that the Wilcoxes ever needed to worry about money.

But Connor had given his approval, and now here they were. Just finishing up the last odds and ends, and then the next morning, Jake and Jeremy and Laurel would start looking for those proverbial needles in the haystack.

Well, good luck with it, the primus said, and gave another look around the place. But have you really thought about what you’re going to say to these people if you do manage to track them down?

Yes, Jake said without hesitation, knowing he’d mentally rehearsed that speech more than a hundred times. Maybe he was being over-confident, since, as the saying went, no plan ever survived the battlefield. He knew better than to mention such doubts to Connor, however.

Voice firm, he added, First, we have to find them.

1

I sat on my bed and stared at the envelope clutched in my hand. Although it didn’t take too much effort to figure out what the letter was all about — the return address clearly said Utah State University and it had been sent to me, Adara Grant — I still wasn’t sure I wanted to open it. For the past month, I’d been going back and forth with the financial aid office at U of U over my grants, and although they’d assured me on the last go-round that everything had been straightened out and the funds would be in place in time for me to enroll for my senior year, I wasn’t sure I believed them. Enough had gone wrong in my life that I had a hard time thinking something might finally work out for once.

A warm wind played with the curtains, and the air that drifted into my room was rich with the scent of dry grass and pine needles. My mother and I had only lived in Kanab for a little more than eighteen months — we never stayed anywhere for very long — and yet I felt more at home there than many of the places we’d landed. We’d rented a cute little house on the outskirts of town, and my mom had gotten a job waiting tables at one of the more popular local restaurants. No, Kanab wasn’t exactly a party town or anything, but it got a steady stream of tourists coming through, thanks to its proximity to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, and so business at the local restaurants and hotels tended to be brisk most of the time. And because U of U had a satellite campus in Kanab, I was able to live at home and wait tables part-time at the restaurant where my mother worked, and try to save us money that way.

My mother paused at the doorway to my room. You going to open that, or just sit there and stare at it? she inquired, a slight smile lifting her lips. She was in her early forties, but looked at least ten years younger. With her bright blonde hair and big blue eyes, she tended to attract attention wherever she went, which might have been part of the reason why she never had a problem getting waitressing jobs, no matter how much we moved around.

I didn’t look much like her. Maybe there was some shared resemblance in the shape of my mouth or nose, but I had brown hair and eyes that couldn’t decide whether they were gray or green. Probably, I took after my father, but since I didn’t know much about him, I didn’t have any facts to go on, only gut instinct.

However, that wasn’t because my mother had ever deliberately hidden things from me. No, she’d always been pretty blunt about how, twenty-five years earlier, she’d decided to go on an extended skiing trip with a college friend, starting out in Aspen with a layover in Flagstaff before heading toward their final destination in Tahoe.

Except they never made it to Tahoe. Their second day in Flagstaff, my mom’s friend fell and broke her leg, and my mother had been left to amuse herself while Daphne was stuck in traction at the hospital. During that time, my mother had met the man who became my father in a bar in Flagstaff’s historic downtown district. They’d spent two nights together, and then Daphne was released from the hospital and the two girls left, returning home to Westerville, Ohio, which was home.

Daphne’s leg healed up…and then my mother discovered she was pregnant. My grandparents — whom I’d never met — were prominent members of the community and their Baptist church, and basically threw her out of the house. Because she’d been working part-time as a waitress in addition to going to school, she stuck with waitressing to provide for herself, working up until pretty much the moment I entered this world. That kind of life would have worn down a lot of women, but my mother still looked fresh and pretty and like the sort of country-club PTA mom she might have been if she’d finished college and gotten married to a doctor or lawyer, then gone on to have a picture-perfect family.

I never asked her why she didn’t get married. There had been a few men over the years, but none of those relationships seemed to last very long. And then once I turned ten and the trouble started, there really wasn’t anyone at all.

If I just stare at it and don’t open it, then it still has the possibility of being one thing or another, I said. But as soon as I see what’s inside, then it’s all over.

Her neatly plucked brows drew together as she appeared to puzzle over that remark. My mother was a smart woman, and more capable than she probably had ever thought she would need to be, but I had a feeling she didn’t know much about the Schrödinger’s cat paradox or quantum mechanics. Not that I pretended to really understand them, either.

You know what happens, I went on, my tone lowering. When I get upset, I mean.

At once, her lips pressed together. We’d had this discussion before, but things had been quiet for a while, and I had a feeling she was doing her best to tell herself that the worst was over, that the storms in our past were no indicator for what the future might hold.

You don’t know that for sure, honey, she replied reasonably. Actually, you don’t really know that at all. It’s just been…coincidence. Bad luck.

I didn’t reply, only turned the letter over in my hands again. Maybe she was right. After all, it was pretty far-fetched to think that every time something went horribly wrong in my life, the weather turned absolutely foul, but if it was all coincidence, then I was batting nearly a thousand. When we were living near Durango, Colorado, I fell off a tree swing on my tenth birthday and broke my arm. At the same time, a small tornado had appeared out of nowhere and flattened a barn on the outskirts of town. Neither of us had thought anything of it, except that it seemed pretty weird for a tornado to set down in such hilly country. That had been the opinion of the locals, too — none of them could recall such a phenomenon ever occurring there before. It had been so out of the ordinary that the National Weather Service had dispatched a team to investigate. The damage was extensive enough for them to declare that yes, it had been an F-1 tornado, but even they couldn’t explain why it had appeared there, of all places.

Strange, but it wasn’t until one of the boys at school pushed me down on purpose during a rough game of dodgeball and an enormous thundercloud appeared directly over the school, sending a bolt of lightning down which nearly struck the little bastard, that I began to wonder if something very odd was happening to me. But when I told my mother what had occurred, she’d only shaken her head and said my imagination was playing with me, and of course, it was just a coincidence.

As were all the other coincidences that followed. Part of the reason why we’d moved so much over the past fourteen years was that it only took a couple of those bizarre occurrences for people to start to stare at us darkly and grumble about how those things had only begun happening after we’d shown up in town. After a while, though, my mother and I didn’t even bother to discuss what was going on — she’d shut me down enough that by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I realized she didn’t want to acknowledge that there was something very strange going on with me. The excuses always were that she’d heard she could make more money in such-and-such a place, or that the manager in her latest job was way too handsy and she didn’t dare report him. Just whatever it took to get us away to a new town where we could start over and pretend that the trail of calamity which appeared to follow our little family was nothing more than simple bad luck.

I turned the envelope over once again. We’ve had a lot of it, then.

Not since we moved here, she pointed out, and I didn’t quite sigh.

She was right about that. We were outsiders in Kanab, but we’d been welcomed all the same. I’d been patching together my studies as best I could, taking classes here and there, managing to get an associate of arts degree eventually. When we settled in Utah, I applied for financial aid at Utah State University and got it, and had a completely uneventful junior year there, despite the constant undercurrent of worry that something was going to set me off and a tornado would descend and destroy half the pretty little town that was our new home.

Nothing like that had happened, though. People were friendly, but I also got the vibe — especially from the guys — that since I wasn’t Mormon, I wasn’t going to get asked out on dates, and I wasn’t going to be a part of the local social life. Which was fine by me. It seemed safer to hold myself apart. In a way, being an outsider was all I really knew, since I’d spent my whole life having it be only my mother and me, no father, no grandparents…just the two of us drifting from place to place in a desperate attempt to find somewhere that could be home.

In Kanab, I thought we might have finally found that home, and I didn’t want